Color-Blindness: Cicero's Death, Declamation, and the Production of History

Abstract

T HIS PAPER IS, most broadly, a study in the writing of history; specifically it is a case study of the writing of Cicero's death by authors ancient and modern. It examines the techniques by which Romans produced accounts of this event, along with the principles according to which modern scholars evaluate and extract information from these accounts as they pursue various historical questions. The ancient accounts of Cicero's death and certain related events are numerous and divergent, appearing over several centuries in many different kinds of sources, including biography, historiography, declamation, oratory, and epic.1 Modern scholars, for their part, have generally confronted this tradition in one of two ways. Some seek to glean from these accounts evidence for the politics and culture of the late Republic generally, the workings of the criminal courts, or the life of Cicero-but the divergences and contradictions within the tradition sharply limit these efforts.2 The other approach, source criticism, finds opportunity rather than limitation in the plethora of divergent accounts: Homeyer 1964, the only systematic treatment of the death-ofCicero tradition to date, seeks to establish the main sources (Hauptquellen) of the tradition, and to create stemmata that attach later versions to these